Writing bestsellers about your inner life

‘I can't talk to people. I'm very shy. It feels like an enormous restriction in my life, like I'm exploding because I can't express anything. But if I'm writing then I don't have that problem. For me, literature is a place where I can gain some freedom, to write whatever I want...

My friends, acquaintances, girls... had always held a low opinion of me... which burned inside me. However, I knew I had it in me (to become a writer), because my yearnings were so strong and they never found any rest. How could they? How else was I going to crush everyone?

(Later I decided) I am not an author any more. I couldn't do it though. I started writing a few months later. I have a feeling something is broken and I'm trying to heal it. Writing is the only way I know. It's an addiction....'

Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of My Struggle, a six-part autobiographical sequence which has been an international literary sensation